Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Cassius, when denouncing the usurpation of the First Cæsar:—
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was fam'd with more than one man?
When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walks encompassed but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough;
When there is in it but one only man.
O! you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once, that would have brook'd
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome,
As easily as a king."
In the pages of Tacitus there is often a spirit visible akin to that of Dante. The Roman indeed had not the advantage of the Florentine in a sure and certain faith that there was a region of bale reserved for his political enemies, and accordingly could not exhibit Tiberius in a red-hot tomb like Farinata's, nor imprison Nero in a pool of ice, like the Archbishop Ruggieri. But he did all that lay in his power to make both of these emperors infamous for ever, and in the following words of the 'Annals,' points at the secret tortures that await the wicked even on earth. Tiberius had addressed a letter to the senate, in which were the following words (the English reader may be reminded that we have not the letter itself, and so cannot divine the context of these words, which may merely have related to physical sufferings): "What to write, conscript fathers—in what terms to express myself, or what to refrain from writing—is a matter of such perplexity, that if I knew how to
